Raymond Parade

On the third Saturday in April, volunteers of the Raymond Community Association set up the grounds around the Raymond Museum on Road 608. At ten in the morning a peddlers’ and craft fair opens there, with concessions and live music. Raymond lies about 20 miles north-northeast of Madera on Road 600, in the Sierra foothills between Madera and Oakhurst. Visitors shop the craft booths, eat from the food trucks, listen to local bands, and wait for the parade, which steps off at high noon, rain or shine.

Craft fair at ten, parade at noon

The association lists the day’s activities for children as an Easter egg hunt, a petting zoo, face painting, and a separate area set aside for the youngest. In 2026 the craft fair ran from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., alongside a silent auction and a raffle. The 2025 raffle was drawn at 3:00 p.m. as the parade wound down. It offered more than 75 prizes donated from across the valley.

The entries gather at Footman Park and on the dirt road beside the Cal Fire MMU Raymond Fire Station. Footman Park is a 40-acre park that the nonprofit association manages, along with the parade and a scholarship fund for local youth. Horses and other animals are kept out of the staging area and wait in their own parking area on Road 606. On other days the park is open to the public, with picnic tables, shade structures, barbecues, and horseshoe pits.

Camels and a grand marshal

The 2025 parade ran on Saturday, April 19. Michael Tellez of KMPH reported more than 50 entries: local first responders, tractors, businesses, 4-H clubs, Rodeo Royalty, classic cars, and camels from Patient Feather Ranch. Bill Williams Sr. served as grand marshal. His family’s roots in the area go back to the 1800s. Each year the association picks local residents and families to lead the line. KMPH reported a surge of visitors at the museum and the town’s other historical establishments. The station also gave the name the parade is known by: the “biggest little town parade in the country.”

A learners’ parade, 1986

The parade began with a request from outside town. The yosemitefoothills.com town site tells it this way. In 1986 Cleo Martin of Madera, representing the Golden State Parade Association, came to the Quinns, then owners of the Raymond General Store, “with an unusual request. Would Raymond sponser a parade?” The association wanted a place to hold a learners’ parade, and Raymond “fit the bill.” Entry cost $1 that first year. The same site, last modified in 2005, said the parade was “known for its friendly, non-competitive atmosphere.” By 2026 the association’s entry form promised a sweepstakes trophy, a plaque for every entry, and awards presented along the route.

The sources do not agree on how many parades there have been. The association’s own page called the 2025 parade the 37th. Its entry form and Facebook listing called the April 18, 2026 parade the 38th, and Sierra News Online listed the same day as the 39th. The 2026 theme was “Homestead to Hometown,” and the entry form announced: “Raymond is celebrating 140 Years!”

Wild Cat Station and the Miller house

The place was first called Wild Cat Station. Archibald Campbell Shaw told how it changed in a history he wrote for the Raymond Tattler in March 1933. Early in 1886, Henry Washburn, manager of the Yosemite Stage and Turnpike Company, warned the Southern Pacific’s San Francisco agent, a Mr. Mann, that the rains had been so heavy “there will be no bottom to the roads between Madera and the foothills.” The railroad built a branch from Berenda about twenty-three miles into the foothills. It ended at a well-wooded flat called the Hog Ranch, and the company named the stop Raymond. Shaw wrote that the name came “presumably” from Mr. Raymond of the Raymond-Whitcomb Travel Association. The first passenger train arrived that March, and Walter Bowen put up a tent hotel near the big tree by the depot.

Charles Miller was appointed joint agent for the railroad and the stage company. He homesteaded the 150 acres of the town site, laid out the town, and began selling lots. His house now holds the Raymond Museum. Lynn and Wayne Northrop restored it in 2008. The house has a granite basement, and an old vertical stone saw stands on the grounds.

The saw points to the quarries. Shaw tells how Luke David took up the land of the main quarry reluctantly. He wanted a spring and a piece of creek bottom, and he had to take “a seemingly worthless pile of rocks” along with them. By Shaw’s day, granite men called it “the largest and best building granite in the world.” One of the quarry’s first big jobs, the San Francisco Post Office, employed about two hundred fifty men. The museum describes the stone, Sierra White, as the densest white granite in the United States.

Shaw dates the Yosemite tourist traffic through Raymond from 1886 to 1906; the museum gives 1886 to 1907. Each morning, he wrote, fifty or more tourists ate breakfast in town. Then, “while horses chafed at their bits,” they were seated in the stages. Each stage swung first to the depot for baggage, then to the hotel platform for passengers, and the next followed soon after. Over twenty years, Shaw wrote, the drivers carried thousands of passengers to Wawona and Yosemite “without a single loss of life.”

The 2005 town site described parade day as “the sounds of horses and tack, children’s laughter, and old friends greeting each other,” and added: “All that’s missing today is the sound of the train whistle.”